


Masculine Women, Feminine Men [Fanvid]

by Tafadhali



Series: Multifandom Trope Vids [12]
Category: Multi-Fandom
Genre: (I avoid depicting blackface in the vid but several of the films feature it), Author Commentary, Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Crossdressing, Embedded Video, F/F, Fanvids, Further Reading/Viewing Suggestions, Genderbending, Golden Age Hollywood, M/M, Multi, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Queer Themes, pansy craze, silent films
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-14 03:16:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29785647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tafadhali/pseuds/Tafadhali
Summary: Masculine Women, Feminine Men,which is the rooster which is the hen?It's hard to tell 'em apart today.An exploration of the gay and lesbian characters and tropes of (mostly) pre-Code Hollywood.
Series: Multifandom Trope Vids [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2096895
Comments: 10
Kudos: 21





	1. Masculine Women, Feminine Men

**Author's Note:**

> There are detailed notes on the films included and some of the film trends explored in the vid in a second chapter, along with recommended reading/viewing for greater context on queer film history. You can find a full list of titles on [Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/tafadhali/list/masculine-women-feminine-men-fanvid-sources/).
> 
> Rather than listing character names for 40+ often obscure films in the characters field, I have listed some of the Hollywood actors and male and female impersonators featured most prominently in order to spotlight their work. (It also seemed appropriate, as the vid is more focused on film history/performance/stock character types than on specific narratives.)

Cross-posted on [Tumblr](https://tafadhali.tumblr.com/post/644576180141506560/masculine-women-feminine-men-a-multifandom)


	2. Vid Notes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Extended notes on some of the films featured in the vid and a list of suggested further reading/viewing.

**Background:**

This vid grew out of my interest in queer representation onscreen stretching back to the early days of Hollywood (and will probably be the beginning of a series focusing on different decades and tropes, because I love a trope vid). Part of my experience with consuming queer media (and I believe a shared experience of many other LGBT* people) is identifying with and reveling in representation no matter how dubious—songs and characters and images that may be meant to shock straight sensibilities or to provide an easy laugh but which hold an ambivalent appeal for the queer viewer.

The movies included in this vid mostly come from a brief window in the 1920s and '30s where much of the theater and movie-going public were similarly intrigued by nudge-nudge-wink-wink gay content, which found its roots in cabarets, dance halls, and vaudeville and reached its mainstream pop culture peak with the "Pansy Craze" of the early 1930s. In the late '20s and early '30s, many American films featured walk-on comic relief gay characters for the savvy audience member to identify from telltale signs (the floppy wrist, the flowered lapel, the Sapphic monocle). Some movies had more prominent side characters or even central gay themes. While Hollywood movies continued to work in gay content for humor or a dash of danger throughout the decades, the overtness of queer film presence decreased significantly with the introduction of a formal censorship system in 1934, which cracked down on all types of on-screen "sin" and which would explicitly limit gay themes and characters until the introduction of the modern ratings system in 1967.

(Note: my focus in this vid is on American films produced in the studio system, and mostly on musicals and comedies. Independent film and films from different countries have their own history of queer representation, often more explicit and sympathetic than mainstream Hollywood movies. _Borderline_ (1930), for example, has both a much more grounded portrayal of a butch woman as well as a plot centered around race relations and featuring actual black actors, unlike most of the films in this vid, which mostly limit their racial diversity to dance numbers or to black- and brownface.)

Obviously, both the song and many of the images in this vid can be read as homophobic! I think the song is a bop, personally. The movies represent a spectrum of attitudes towards gay characters and behaviors, from the evergreen and often offensive mistaken-for-gay jokes (I could have included many, many more of those) to some slyer in-jokes to even some fairly respectful or affirming representations. And, of course, many of the on-screen "pansies" or tuxedo-wearers were queer (or rumored to be queer) off-screen as well, adding their own levels to what could be one-dimensional jokes. Mostly where I land on things is reveling in gender confusion and feeling affirmed seeing queer images out of the past when many people are still content today to assert that "boys were boys and girls were girls when I was a tot."

**Notes on Sources/Specific Sequences:**

  * Release dates for sources range from 1912-1942, with _most_ movies coming out between 1929 and 1934. The vid is bookended with a couple of clips from the 1950s, though, because I couldn't bear not to include a little snippet of Hollywood's best classic gender-bender, _Some Like It Hot_. It's set in the '20s, anyway.
  * While sexual freedom and androgyny are more associated with the wild 1920s, there are several silents that deal with sissy character or with genuine gender confusion. One of the sources I drew from most frequently in the vid is a very strange and very fascinating silent film from 1914, _A Florida Enchantment_ , which features women and men eating gender-swapping seeds and wreaking some havoc. Barrios writes in _Screened Out_ : "What makes this early film so fresh (in both sense of the word) is the fashion in which the premise is followed through: the magical sex-change seeds taken by the heroine (Edith Storey), her maid (Ethel Lloyd), and her fiancé (Sidney Drew) change the gender of the soul while retaining the old body—thus becoming a fantasy versions of what gay and lesbians were considered at the time, a man trapped in a woman's body and vice versa. And though the the three of them eventually find the comfort of cross-dressing, they each first spend time in what appears to us (and the other characters) as same-sex flirtation. With Edith Storey, in particular, a fair amount of footage is devoted to her dalliances with several women, which are handled with some skill" (p. 21). 
  * _Madame Behave_ (1925) is one of the many movies in this vid that I have just skimmed through for clips and not actually watched (yes, yes, I'm a very lazy multifandom vidder), but is notable for being a star vehicle for Julian Eltinge, one of the most famous female impersonators of the early 20th century (there are also clips from noted male impersonators, Ella Shields and Hetty King, in the vid). Like many "gender illusionists," Eltinge worked hard to cultivate an ultramasculine presentation off-stage, and most of his film appearances walked the same line: "They were mostly comedies where...a red-blooded American male masqueraded as a woman with astonishing verisimilitude. They served as an extension of Eltinge's carefully nurtured image—that he was indeed a virile heterosexual who just happened to be a whiz at acting like an utterly believable woman," ( _Screened Out_ , p. 19-20). Personally my favorite such moment of protesting too much came when RKO's press department claimed (somewhat unconvincingly), "Call [Franklin Pangborn] a sissy offstage...and he'll plant five hard knuckles on your proboscis," ( _SO_ , p. 117). (Sadly, I think Pangborn appears in the vid only once—he's the fellow turning around while looking at a painting through a window, in _Only Yesterday_.)
  * Other actors appear in this vid many more times than once! 
    * Cary Grant's sexuality remains a bit of a mystery and I think he liked to play up the confusion, both on- and off-screen—he and Randolph Scott certainly leaned into "And they were _roommates_ " long before it was a meme. In fact, the clip where he holds up a woman's dress and hat to his body is playing on that relationship; "It's for a friend," he says, referring to co-star Scott. Grant's ad-lib during the peignoir scene in _Bringing Up Baby_ (1938) is widely considered to be the first use of the word "gay" to mean "gay" on-screen: "I just went GAY all of a sudden!" he shouts at May Robson, following it up with "I'm in the middle of 42nd street waiting for a bus," the kind of an excuse a gay man might have given for why he was loitering in a known cruising spot in Times Square. (It's worth watching [the whole scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQDbDIz1Y0E&t=1s).) (And the whole movie.) Cary Grant was also paired frequently with sexually ambiguous female partners in his early films, from Katharine Hepburn in _Bringing Up Baby_ , _Sylvia Scarlett_ , and several other wonderful films not included in this vid, to gay icon Mae West, to the legendary Marlene Dietrich in one of her top-hat-and-tails roles.
    * Speaking of Marlene!! I dedicated a whole subsection of this vid to her and it's because you simply _cannot_ make a vid about masculine women in classic Hollywood without celebrating the sheer glamour the woman brought to a tux. From _Morocco_ (1930), where she iconically kisses a woman in the audience of her cabaret show, to _Blonde Venus_ (1932), where on-stage she flirts with Cary Grant and off-stage she is part of a classic fallen woman narrative, to the much later _Seven Sinners_ (1940), where she gets one last chance to gender-bend post-Hollywood Production Code (and to play pool).
  * Another favorite anecdote from _Screened Out_ relates to the sinewy dance Claudette Colbert does with the innocent Elissa Landi in _The Sign of the Cross_ (1932) (on the lyrics "stop, look, listen, and you'll agree with me" in the vid). When Agnes DeMille was filming _Cleopatra_ with her uncle/director Cecil B. DeMille a couple years later, she remembers him reacting strongly to her not-sexy-enough dance: 

> Cecil said 'Oh, no, no! This won't do. There's no sex, there's nothing, there's no excitement. This wouldn't seduce anybody.' And he said 'This wouldn't seduce me.'...I lost my temper [when] Cecil said, 'I want the kind of dance we had in _Sign of the Cross_ , a lesbian dance.' I said, 'I thought that was one of the funniest things I ever saw.' And he said, 'Well _baby_ , that's the kind of humor we're looking for!' (p. 89)

  * Yes, the clip on "brother _just loves_ his permanent wave" is of a person saying he " _loves_ chocolate" in _Palmy Days_ (1931) and, yes, it is an unsubtle interracial gay sex joke, followed up with the stinger that the flower on top of his cake shouldn't be a rose, but a _pansy_. He is an example of a walk-on character who would have been instantly recognizable as a pansy type from his cane, mustache, and flowered lapel, even if it weren't for the sublimely obvious dialogue.
  * Finally, one of the most interesting discoveries for me making this vid was the early Frank Capra silent picture, _The Matinee Idol_ (1928). Like most Capra films, it centers on a conflict between small-town earnestness and big city cynicism, with the underdogs ultimately overcoming with a principled stand. The plot also centers on blackface, unfortunately—a blackface star discovers a podunk theater troupe and conspires to bring it to Broadway as an unwitting comedy piece, before falling in love with the lead actress—but alongside that aspect of the film is some interesting queer representation. The theater troupe includes a "sissy" type who is beloved by his co-stars and (like the rest of the troupe) doesn't know why he is an object of ridicule for big city audiences. This is my favorite clip:



**Recommended Viewing and Reading**

A complete list of sources is available at [Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/tafadhali/list/masculine-women-feminine-men-fanvid-sources/). Of the sources, there are many I haven't watched all the way through, but the ones I can recommend are:

  * _A Florida Enchantment_ and _Matinee Idol_ are both very problematic, but interesting to check out
  * _Pandora's Box_ (1929)
  * _Blonde Venus_ (1932)
  * _Design for Living_ (1933) 
  * _Queen Christina_ (1933)
  * _The Gay Divorcée_ (1934)
  * _Bringing Up Baby_ (1938)
  * _Some Like It Hot_ (1959)



Additional viewing:

  * _The Celluloid Closet_ (1995)—the classic documentary, based on Vito Russo's book of the same name
  * _The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender_ (1997)—a slightly more informal walk through gay film, it does focus on some areas that are less emphasized in _Celluloid Closet_ , like Westerns ("too much Walter Brennan" reads one Letterboxd review, but for my vidding purposes: just enough Walter Brennan), Hope-Crosby films, and Cary Grant's career (I drew clips from those part of the documentary for this vid). You can watch it in its entirety on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXEkilYPKGs&t=5240s).



Additional reading:

  * _Screened Out_ (2003) by Richard Barrios—this is the book I quoted from above and it is (all due respect to Vito Russo) my favorite book on queer film history, focused specifically on the early days of Hollywood through the 1960s; I have a frankly obsessive list of books mentioned in it on [Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/tafadhali/list/movies-mentioned-in-screened-out/), including snippets from the text, if you want to learn more about movies not covered in this vid
  * _The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies_ (1995) by Vito Russo—the original and worth a read; it's encyclopedic up to the time it was written
  * _Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema_ (1992) by Andrea Weiss—if you want something that focuses more on female rep and on slightly artier and more obscure films (this is where I learned about _Borderline_ )
  * _Legendary Creatures: The First Decade of RuPaul's Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life_ (2020) by Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez—this is less focused on film, but is a breezy, informative read about different aspects of queer performance, specifically drag and other gender-bending arts; it has sections on Eltinge and other similar figures
  * _Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940_ (1994) by George Chauncey—this isn't about film at all but it is my absolute favorite history of gay life in the time period being depicted in this vid
  * _David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 Years of LGBT Music_ (2017) by Darryl Bullock—this sometimes feels like just reading lists of names, but it's very comprehensive and it's where I encountered the song used in this vid (I have since, as of yesterday, also seen the song in a TikTok, lol)




End file.
